For at least two months now, I have been unable to create and save an audience in Facebook Audience Insights. It doesn't work in either Chrome and or Firefox, even with all extensions disabled, and the problem is present whether you use the old version or the new...

Referral Spam in Analytics, a.k.a. "Fake Traffic" has been annoying us for a while now, and it's still a problem, ESPECIALLY for small businesses. If you have less than 1000 visitors a month, often nearly half the supposed traffic to a website is fake! After reviewing...

I know there are a myriad of secure and safe "password keeper" solutions out there, but I've never personally used one. This morning I had to get into a web hosting CPanel which I hadn't been in for over two years, and although the password was saved in Chrome, it...

Nearly two weeks ago, Google rolled out a brand new feature in Google Analytics, allowing you to move a property from one account to another. Yes, really! To accomplish the move, you do have to be a full admin user for each of the two accounts; the one that is the...

I'm honored to be appearing in two sessions this year at Pubcon Las Vegas, the oldest internet marketing conference on the planet. I will be speaking primarily on AMP - Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages... Tuesday October 11 2016 Time 10:10a - 11:20a Location Salon G...

Referral Spam in Analytics, a.k.a. "Fake Traffic" has been annoying us for a while now, and this month showed no improvement. After reviewing about a dozen client accounts for August of 2016, I've found nearly 20 suspicious domains, and I've added them my Google...

For years now, I've offered a free Excel add-in I call "Links Live" that lets you make columns of hyperlinks live, or "clickable". This summer, there was a Windows security update that caused the add-in to become disabled each time you opened up Excel. In order to get...

The problem of fake website traffic has been annoying us for years now, and there's no end in sight. After reviewing about a dozen client accounts for July, I've found 16 more suspicious domains to add to my Google Analytics referral spam exclusion segment this month....

Today I got an email from someone telling me that their BBB seal was disappearing when someone hovers over it. I then looked at their site, where I saw that yes, sure enough, it the logo completely disappears when the mouse is hovered over it. I decided to get the...

I am unable to associate any Google Analytics property with any Google Search Console accounts. I simply get an error message reading "You don't have Edit permissions to this Google Analytics property" for all domains in all accounts, and it's been going on for over...

After reviewing the June statistics for 13 clients, there were only six more suspicious domains to add to the segment this month. The domains that have been added are: site-auditor.online law-enforcement-dd.xyz slow-website.xyz fix-website-errors.com...

The tool below answers the nagging question, "Which phrase get more searches, 'accident lawyer' or 'accident attorney'?" and it will do it for multiple phrases at a time. Google used to offer the ability to get search volume for a specific set of phrases in the...

In March I speculated on Twitter that the Google analytics referral spam referral spam problem might be solved. At the time, lots of people agreed with me, and things stayed pretty clean through the first part of April. Did @googleanalytics fix the referral spam...

As of now, it looks like this may be the last update needed. Last month I only needed to add six domains to my referral spam blocking segment, and this month there were even less. Going through the referral stats for nearly 40 client websites, I only found two...

One of the most useful tools I ever had built was a "keyword multiplier." It lets you enter some keywords, along with some variables, and it multiplies those variations into a long and complete list of phrases. Up until yesterday, the tool would return your combined...

Enter your business name and zip code, and you'll be taken to a secondary screen. From there, you'll add your single most important keyword or phrase, and select your business form the the listings we find. For a brand new business, you can add your name address and...

On February 12th, Google announced that they would *not* be certifying for Search Engine Optimization, a decision that I disagree with completely. I recently wrote about "Trusted Google Partners" giving the industry a bad name and it really shouldn't be too hard...

Not a week goes by where I don't learn something in this business, and last week blew me away. What I had always considered a hard cold SEO fact turned out to be not true, despite there being claims to the contrary all over the web. Last Friday, February 5, 2016, I...

Hard to believe there are only SIX additions that I could find necessary, after going through the stats for over 30 domains. Is this a sign that things are slowing down? I sure hope so.. .Each month I release a new update to my Google Analytics referral spam segment,...

I'm letting this poll run for a few days... What do you think, and why do you think it? Cast your vote here on Twitter, and feel free to leave any comments below. I'll update this page after the poll is done... After URLs change, for #SEO purposes, which type of...

Google does not always send malware discovery notifications to site owners when they notify the public. I know, because it happened to me again today. Today I got an email from my friend David Portney, showing me that Google was displaying a security warning when...

The day before leaving for Pubcon, I decided to update my laptop to Outlook 2016 from my antique version 2007. Instantly, upon attempting to open the new Outlook, I was shown this message: "Cannot start Microsoft Office Outlook. Cannot open the Outlook window. The set...

When a major event occurs, or you make a big change to your site or your marketing, it's always a good idea to make an annotation in Google Analytics. That way, in the future, whoever is looking at the stats may be able to see a correlation between what took place,...

I'll be showing both presentations that I've put together for Pubcon Las Vegas, coming up the first week of October. They're primarily for advanced audiences, but anyone is welcome to come and I'll be happy to answer questions. The two presentations are... #1 Google...

I just ran across a Google Adwords client with a new toolbar I've not seen before under the keywords tab, that gave me instant access to the negative keywords, and to the keywords that drove the clicks. I'm pretty sure this is brand new, not only because I hadn't...

The other day I found out that my Outlook was associating my Facebook profile picture when I sent email, and that's not what I wanted to happen. Just to be clear, I'm talking about a local installation of Outlook - in my case, Outlook 2013 - and not the web interface...

Maybe I complain a lot, but I'm REALLY disgusted with the video quality on the Motorola Droid Turbo phone when the zoom is used. Really, it's crazy bad, but Verizon Wireless says I'm stuck with it because I'm a month past the 14 day grace period. for the last couple...

I sent a link to a video proposal the other day to a potential new client, and he replied back that he got a security warning trying to watch it on his phone. He didn't say much about the warning at the time, but when we spoke he brought it up again, reading the...

You've probably got a Majestic account, but when's the last time you logged in? Have you seen both of the new visualization features that they released last month? Their hubs of authority graphic helped me spot a Google partner link scheme in mid July, and this...

Sometimes you need to get multiple URLs out of the Google search results, either because you're cleaning up old content, or perhaps you got hacked, or for whatever reason, you want them gone. Google Search Console lets you remove them, but only one at a time, which...

I've been a huge fan of the Joost SEO WordPress Plug-in for quite a while now, and I even make my own settings preferences file available for download as a free resource. However, in recent months, a couple of time saving features have been removed that I really miss....

Are you accustomed to going to the drop-down arrow in the top right of your Facebook login and then selecting "Use Facebook As" and your business name? If so, you may be surprised to find it missing one day soon, if it's not missing already. This has been going on for...

Pubcon is the longest running internet marketing conference in the world, and I first attended the conference in 2004. Over the years, I've spoken at the annual Las Vegas conference every single year, as well as at a regional conference in Austin (where they're now...

Today Google sent out TONS of warning emails, via Google Webmaster Tools Search Console, telling webmasters that "Googlebot cannot access CSS and JS files" on their website. While in some cases this MAY be true, for nearly all of the warnings we received, the warning...

If you link a group of websites together with each other, intending to improve their rankings, would you call that SEO in 2015? While doing some competitive analysis with one of my favorite tools, "Clique Hunter" by Majestic, I ran across what seems to be some...

If you've done any paid advertising on Google, Facebook, or anywhere else, you know that it's getting more competitive and more expensive as time goes on. Implementing a Facebook ad pixel on your site now will enable you to be more efficient with your advertising...

Have you ever looked at your stats and wondered why you had so much traffic during a certain time period? Or perhaps you noticed a dip that took place some time in the past, and have no idea why it happened? Google Analytics allows you to add "Annotations" below your...

I have a new client; actually a friend, who does computer work in California, and he's been a long time user of Google apps for his company. He wanted to implement Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and claim his business with Google My Business, but was getting...

Yesterday I thought it was a Google glitch, but today I still have no way to post from the Google search pages. I made this quick video yesterday and was going to post it, but thought for sure it must be a mistake, so I didn't. Now though, I'm just not sure. The share...